The present invention relates to the test and measurement of video image signals, and more particularly to attentional maps in the objective measurement of video quality degradation.
Both subjective and objective measurements of video quality degradation in video image signals have been done. In subjective measurements human subjects visually compare and rate the degradation between an original and an impaired video image signal. Objective quality measurements are done by comparing an impaired video image signal to its original video image signal. The comparison includes such processing as transforming video image signals into bit-map form, adjusting mutual amplitude gain, offset and spatial shift, filtering them in some fashion, subtracting them from each other, then filtering some more and representing the results either as error maps or as statistics derived from these maps.
Subjective measurement methods suffer from a lack of reproducibility and consistency. Objective methods are mechanistic and lack the ability to differentiate between areas where human observers pay attention ("attentional factors") and those areas without much interest to humans.
What is desired is a measurement method using attentional aspects in objective measurement of video quality degradation that takes advantage of the benefits of both subjective and objective measurement methods.